TED Talks Daily How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking | Advait Sarkar
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Nov 15, 2025 
In this engaging conversation, Advait Sarkar, an AI and design researcher at Microsoft, challenges the notion of AI as a mere assistant. He highlights how outsourcing our reasoning to AI diminishes critical thinking and creativity. Advait advocates for AI as a tool that promotes engagement and deepens thought, featuring a prototype that combines human input with AI-generated prompts. He underscores the importance of preserving human cognition, arguing that even as AI advances, our unique thinking abilities empower us and enrich our lives.
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Outsourced Reason Erodes Cognitive Skills
- Outsourcing reasoning to AI can turn us into "middle managers for our own thoughts," reducing engagement and critical effort.
- This leads to narrower creativity, weaker memory, and less metacognitive skill when AI intermediates our work.
A Day As A Validator Of AI Output
- Sarkar sketches a typical knowledge-worker day where AI drafts emails, reports, analyses, decks, and code for them.
- He describes becoming a "professional validator of a robot's opinions" rather than an engaged creator.
AI Can Shrink Creativity And Memory
- Using AI assistants tends to reduce collective idea diversity and individual critical effort despite apparent speed gains.
- People also remember less of AI-generated summaries and outputs than material they processed themselves.